Mark Thompson: A moral man and an amoral body

BBC Director General Mark Thompson has returned from holiday to deal with the crisis

Mark Thompson values his family life, which, perhaps, explains his reluctance to return from a half-term holiday in Sicily to handle the latest BBC crisis.

There is a growing belief that the Director General may be part of the problem rather than the solution.

An intellectual figure, educated by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst, the private Catholic school, Thompson balances a fascination with modern media technology with an almost medieval interest in morality.

In fact he once considered becoming a monk. Yet despite being such a moral man, he leads an increasingly amoral organisation.

Perhaps this is because of a liberal reluctance to impose his own values on the BBC.

Indeed, speaking once about sexual content on the airwaves, he said he'd 'pushed things over the years further than my own tolerance levels'.

It's also, however, because by training and inclination, he is a thinker and a bureaucrat.

As a result, he's had little impact on the BBC's broadcast content, which explains why the man with a first-class degree in English literature from Merton College, Oxford, has presided over the Corporation's slide into the broadcasting gutter.

After joining the BBC from Oxford as a production trainee, Thompson rose rapidly through the organisation, editing Panorama and the Nine O'Clock News, and becoming controller of BBC2.

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At 44, he left to run Channel 4 but it was always assumed he was just waiting for the top BBC job to fall into his lap.

He was appointed Director General after Greg Dyke's departure.

He lives in North Oxford with his American writer wife, Jane Blumberg, and their three children.

He wears Marks & Spencer rather than Savile Row, and is a notably good cook, specialising in home-made pasta.

In short, Thompson's innate decency couldn't be further from the warped and self-obsessed mindset of the likes of Ross and Brand.

But the tragedy is that, although he loves the BBC, he has never been able to impose his morality on the leviathan Corporation.

When he became director general, Thompson told staff that the BBC was 'a World Heritage site', which 'despite its eccentricities and failings, remains one of the greatest -some might say the greatest - force for cultural good in the world'.

Perhaps the time has come to have the courage of his convictions and finally give the BBC the moral leadership it deserves.